So who ended up with my data when Parler went under?
SOLD
I am beginning to think I need to open up a new space on my website and call it The Parler Chronicles. I have written a great deal about the trials of Parler, a free speech platform that dared to take on the tech giants, was neutralized by heavy-handed de-platforming by the likes of GoDaddy and Amazon. The company would eventually fail.1
Yet the infrastructure that was once the Parler messaging platform remained: the servers, the domain registration of parler.com, and an e-mail system. Parler would change hands, its assets under new management. It would make a couple of fitful restarts as a portal for conservative ideology and conversation, but it would seemingly fade into oblivion.2
Or so you would think. As an experiment, I kept my Parler e-mail account open. It was a dedicated account, so it only collected messages for an e-mail account that presumably only Parler had.3 A few months ago activity was discovered in that account. Beginning March 2024 45 messages had been dumped into the Inbox by the end of the year. The activity really picked up in October. They all came from one source: myamericanpatriot.org
It has yet to come up on the radar as a scam operation, but there are some concerns about the domain.
First, its domain registration is anonymous. Using WHOIS, I was able to trace the registration with GoDaddy and the web servers are based at Cloudfare.
Second, the search results for myamericanpatriot.org produce only a website listing with no explanation. It gives me the impression that the domain is used primarily as a marketing engine for news and related merchandise. Using the Firefox Debugger, it is only a few lines of HTML code, basically posting a default web page provided by the hosting service.
It is here that I would like to introduce readers to two additional resources. One is AbuseIP which provides data on domains and IP addresses indicating whether there have been previous reports of unethical or illegal activity. Myamericanpatriot.org is rated at 0% risk, which is very good. This data is usually compiled from security logs,
Another source is Scam Detector. This website compiles a lot of technical information combined with altruistic observations. Myamericanpatriot.org gets a low score (which is not good) for the same reason I stated above, plus other factors they evaluate such as the proximity of suspicious activity on the same subnet or cloud provider systems. Yet despite the low score, nothing (my opinion) indicates fraudulent activity.
My final step was to look over the e-mails. The links checked out. No redirection to strange websites. What seems to be a pattern are articles posted by the New York Sun, popular conservative writers such as Larry Kudlow and Monica Crowley, and solicitations for purchasing gold from the American Hartford Gold Group. The good news? This appears to be all legit.
I checked the message headers and they trace back to myamericanpatriot.org with no detours to obscure sources.
In essence, there is nothing to worry about here.
But this is a good example of what happens to your e-mail address after a company goes out of business. It is up for sale. Another interesting aspect of the e-mail messages is that they all come through one portal: myamericanpatriot.org. But this portal services about a half dozen clients, relaying their messages to you, the reader. Once again, this shows that the exposure of your e-mail address can be expanded exponentially.
The remedy I have discussed at length in other articles. First, use multiple e-mail accounts based on risk. You can learn more about this by reading E-mail: A Method to the Madness. In a similar vein, I recommend that you take a close look at how you manage your passwords. E-mail accounts are not the only thing that migrate from one company to the next. Along with that information are your user ID and password. The passwords are usually contained in an encrypted database. But given enough time, criminal elements can decipher your password. You can learn more about being smarter with your passwords by reading Passwords: The Gremlins of Cyberspace.
The End
Alas, it is time for me to close the book on Parler (or so I think). My solution to this riddle is simply to delete the e-mail account. So long Parler. Yet in the space of time I started writing this article, the Parler messaging app resurfaced. So it may be possible that I return to the journey of Parler. I am already a part of three chat services, which is more than an old asynchronous guy like me can follow.
Yet look at the legacy it left behind. Twitter was the villain behind the shutdown of Parler. Today it is a free speech platform owned by Elon Musk. It has even lost its name. Alongside X are other free speech platforms such as Gab and Telegraph. While Amazon and Microsoft are still dominant cloud service providers, there are numerous cloud centers that have since emerged. Domain registration sites have increased, no longer cornered by the likes of GoDaddy. YouTube is now being challenged by Rumble, Patreon by Locals. And the mainstream media is being jostled by Substack. All this began when one day after January 6, 2021, Big Tech decided to destroy Parler. It was a Pyrrhic victory.
- See Why Parler? and Disaster Recovery — The Case of Parler. Please note that the Parler messaging app has recently been resurrected. ↩︎
- See What’s Up with Parler? and Parler Reborn. ↩︎
- See E-mail: A Method to the Madness for suggestions on using dedicated e-mail accounts. ↩︎
© Copyright 2025 to Eric Niewoehner